Welcome to New York's Upper East Side, where the wealthy and connected mingle at benefits and try to deal with their always-dramatic love lives, not to mention picking colleges. Blair Waldorf is the so-called toast of adolescence in her world; she and her friends, Kati Farkas and Isabel Coates, go to a prep school and fancy parties with their rich parents. Blair is envied by her adversaries because she is thought to have the perfect life, not just because of her gorgeous boyfriend, Nate Archibald, but because she's also planning on getting into her dream college, Yale. With everyone worried about college(or procrastinating on worrying, which everyone seems to be doing), and junior year dragging along, her seemingly perfect life is interrupted by her ex-best friend, the beautiful Serena van der Woodsen, coming back into town after getting kicked out of boarding school. Serena comes back into her life, and into the eyes of Blair's boy friend. When everything Blair knows starts to fall apart, everyone will realize that her life is far from perfect. Will life in the the Upper East Side redeem itself of what it's really supposed to be? Or will the false facade reveal that the rich have the same problems as the not so rich (Jenny and Dan Humphrey), if not more. And just maybe Jenny and Dan are all the more happy with their simple, not-so-expectant lives.
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For a while, scripts kept mysteriously turning up online before episodes aired. Producers hired a private investigator and eventually traced it to a teenage hacker overseas who'd broken into a writer's email and was selling scripts on eBay. Because the hacker was a minor, nothing could be done, so the crew started printing scripts on red paper just to stop leaks.
Even after starring in the finale where the mystery blogger's identity gets revealed, Ed Westwick has admitted he genuinely still isn't sure who Gossip Girl actually was.
Then-Mayor Michael Bloomberg was such a fan of the show and its effect on the city's image that he officially declared January 26th 'Gossip Girl Day' in New York, and he even popped up with a small cameo in one of the later seasons.
A random bit of trivia that always gets a laugh: Penn Badgley's first name reportedly comes from the tennis ball company Penn, not any family name or tradition.
There was a scene cut from the original pilot where Dan's writing habits made test audiences immediately assume he was Gossip Girl. The show pulled that scene so the mystery could actually run for six seasons instead of getting solved in episode one.
Creators Josh Schwartz and Stephanie Savage had just wrapped up their run on The O.C. and wanted to bring what they'd learned to a New York setting. That itch to do something bigger and glossier in Manhattan is basically where Gossip Girl was born.
The Empire Hotel, which Chuck Bass owns on the show, is an actual working hotel in New York. Fans started showing up in droves after it aired, so the bar there began serving Gossip Girl-themed cocktails, including a secret-recipe 'XOXO' drink.
Writer Joshua Safran has said that his original top picks for the person behind Gossip Girl weren't Dan at all, they were Serena's brother Eric van der Woodsen or her on-off love interest Nate Archibald. Safran left the show before the final season aired, so the reveal that eventually landed wasn't the one he'd been building toward.
Zuzanna Szadkowski, who played the Waldorf family's maid Dorota, said in an interview that she genuinely believes her character would have made a better final reveal than Dan. A lot of fans who found the actual ending underwhelming tend to agree with her.
Throughout the series, whenever the core group needed to gather for something big, they always seemed to end up at the Metropolitan Museum steps, and that's exactly where the whole cast reconvenes right before the finale's big reveals.
